Report: Software tracks your movements via social media

The Raytheon video tracking Nick across the United States. (Image: Screenshot from The Guardian website)

Raytheon, a Massachusetts-based Defense Department contractor, has built citizen tracking software that pulls information from social networks that ostensibly will be used sold to the US government, according to a videoobtained by The Guardian.

From the article:

The Massachusetts-based company has acknowledged the technology was shared with US government and industry as part of a joint research and development effort, in 2010, to help build a national security system capable of analysing “trillions of entities” from cyberspace.

Using public data from Facebook, Twitter, Gowalla and Foursquare, the software — cleverly called RIOT or Rapid Information Overlay Technology — gathers uploaded information and forms a profile of people’s every move that registered with one of the websites. The video starts with a demonstration by Raytheon’s ‘principal investigator’ Brian Urch showing how easy it is to track an employee named Nick — a real person — based on all the places he has checked in using his smartphone.

“When people take pictures and post them on the Internet using their smartphones, the phone will actually embed the latitude and longitude in the header data — so we’re going to take advantage of that,” Urch says. “So now we know where Nick’s gone…and now we’ll predict where he’ll be in the future.” Urch goes on to analyze — using graphs and calendars — where Nick likes to spend his personal time and make predictions about his behavior.

“If you ever wanted to get ahold of his laptop, you might want to visit the gym at 6 AM on Monday,” Urch says with alarming casualty.

The video’s disturbing nature goes without saying. These are the tools of a Big Brother.

But its a reminder that advertisers are not the only ones with interest in the reams of data these social networks collect about regular people. As a matter of perspective: had the CIA built Facebook, we’d all be terrified.

Users that enjoy posting their lives onto computers they don’t control — i.e. those of Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al — should not be surprised when that data gets out of their control. Governments, like France, are doing what they can to keep an eye on how social networking data is used, but at the end of the day, if we don’t want Facebook and Twitter using our data, we shouldn’t give it to them.

Also, this video features technology developed in 2010 — three years ago. No doubt the tracking software has come a long way since then.